Yeah, I saw this critique show up a few months ago and now I'm seeing it everywhere, even in major financial news sites like Bloomberg.[0] It's certainly worth discussing, but people are taking it as a gotcha to prove the AI boom is fake. However, all the AI companies have to buy from Nvidia anyway. And Nvidia has tons of cash, in fact it has 4x the cash on hand now than it did in 2023, despite all the investments.[1] So yes, if they think the AI market will grow then of course they will buy into it. If all of Nvidia's deals went bad, their stock would plummet, but not because they lost a few tens of billions, rather because that would mean the AI market is going down in general. There is a great counterexample to the "AI is propped up by circular funding" argument in Google, which uses its own TPUs and builds its own AI, and integrates it into it's own end-user products, no circular deals needed. If AI is propped up by anything it is investors and companies thinking it will give them a huge return. Circular deals are a result of that: cash is going everywhere into that market, it's that simple. The AI boom may be a bubble, but not due to circular deals in particular.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-10-07/openai-s-...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/04/nvidia-has-a-cash-problem-to... -- Actually "Cash and short-term investments", not sure what is included in that, but I don't think it includes these major deals.